History

In 1839 LaRoy Sunderland founded the Newbury Biblical Institute, a Methodist school in Vermont.[6] This was the first seminary of the United Methodist Church.[6] In 1846 the school was moved to New Hampshire and renamed the Methodist General Biblical Institute of Concord.[6] In 1866 the school's trustees declined an invitation from Harvard University to relocate to Cambridge, and, instead, they decided to move to Boston. In 1867 the Boston School of Theology was opened.[6]

The idea for a university came from acting-president William Fairfield Warren; he envisioned a school that took the best from the German and English models - one which would include undergraduate colleges, graduate schools and professional schools.[6] In 1869 the school was chartered by Lee Claflin, Jacob Sleeper and Isaac Rich; their and Warren's abolitionist ideas led them to create a university that was open to both genders and all races.[2] Warren is thought to have articulated the first need-blind admissions policy in the United States: "any admitted student would be able to attend; scholarships would take care of financial need".[6]

Alumni

Notable alumni include Civil Rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., the first woman to earn a Ph.D. (Helen Magill White), the first woman admitted to the bar in Massachusetts (Lelia Robinson), the first Native American to graduate with a doctorate in medicine, and the first African-American psychiatrist in the United States (Solomon Carter Fuller).[2]